They could make (and have made) waterproof phones with removable batteries. Greed and lack of regulation keeps modern phones sealed.

Off isn’t off anymore, unfortunately.

It’s fascinatingly dumb how short-sighted they are. Do they like having money? People deported, in jail, dead, unemployed, homeless can’t buy their stuff. A delusional hope of feeding off government money only works until the government no longer has a use for you, or decides to just take you over and you become part of the government.

It is in their best interests to support the masses, but they can’t ever see past 3 months in the future.

No, in fact airplane mode often keeps Bluetooth and WiFi powered up until manually disabled, depending on the phone model, sometimes other radios as well. It also keeps GPS on so the phone can still track where it goes while in airplane mode.

I’ve tested some and they work good if properly wrapped shut, but probably better for day-to-day use and less for such an event where you’d probably be best just to leave it home. Phones use radio frequencies from 14MHz (NFC) to 39GHz (5G mmWave) with spec up to 71GHz. It is real hard to get a radio wave blocker bag that can block almost every conceivable frequency band in the RF spectrum.

It is also hard to truly turn phones off anymore, many broadcast Bluetooth beacons when powered off, and even outside of that, they leave dead-reckoning tracking turned on that can extrapolate where you may have gone just by how you walk. It is also why a phone turned off can still have a dead battery in a month or two, because stuff is kept running, when older phones truly turned off and you could pick it up a year later and still have a charge.

You need the phone turned off, and the offline Bluetooth most phones these days broadcast also disabled. The NFC could also passively respond, although that would require more clever engineering to make a directional NFC scanner. ISO 15693 apparently extends the NFC distance to 3 feet.

It’s a tax on every stage of the process, nobody “switched to it”. All for the government, that didn’t contribute to the process. That doesn’t make a train stop at my mom’s home town anymore even though their country is smaller than my state but has all the tax money. Including price in price is nothing. The SIZE is the important part. I balked at 9% sales tax in my state, used to be 6%. Yours is amplified 20% times 5. Design, execution, physical build, assembly, final product. That’s crazy.

And why ever say “we switched to VAT”. It’s just a name. Tax, VAT, Tariff. All words. You’re probably a bot anyway.

Yep, learned that! Still mind-blowing how crippling it is.

Edit: Holy crap, so I based my initial comment on how EU Internet friends always complain about how much their iPhone or PlayStation is, so I incorrectly assumed VAT was only for foreign products to encourage purchase of domestic. No, VAT is just a fancy way of saying “sales tax” that is really high and charged everywhere. Strikethrough edits below, but leaving original text.

So the EU, UK, and others have charged VAT for years on foreign goods, including US goods. This is a tax on foreign goods that can add hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros/etc. to the purchase of an American iPhone (made in China or India) for example.

This whole tariff thing is dumber than something a third grader could come up with…but…these countries were already doing it themselves to others. So they should politely STFU, as they are hypocrites.

I get having high income taxes to provide for socialized medicine and such, that’s awesome, but also a sales tax that is a quarter of the price of a thing or service, taxed just because? Even if it wasn’t made by the nation’s citizens? Even if it was?

I’m sure it keeps EUians and UKians from going full Capitalism, but wow, especially given how much infrastructure degrades despite the funding, I recall seeing Germany cutting train routes all over across the country and small towns being cut off from them some years back and flabbergasted, knowing their high taxes go to government things…but also sales tax on top of that? 🤯

What really sucks, is they’ll likely stay quiet about this, and join a tariff war anyways, and tack tariffs on top of VAT and their citizens will just be double-taxed. Why do UK-ians and EU-ians put up with this nonsense?

It gets wackier too, from the EU VAT rules site (emphasis mine):

The EU has standard rules on VAT, but these rules may be applied differently in each EU country. In most cases, you have to pay VAT on all goods and services at all stages of the supply chain including the sale to the final consumer. This includes from the beginning to the end of a production process, e.g. buying components, transport, assembly, provisions, packaging, insurance and shipping to the final consumer.

For EU-based companies, VAT is chargeable on most sales and purchases of goods within the EU. In such cases, VAT is charged and due in the EU country where the goods are consumed by the final consumer. Likewise, VAT is charged on services at the time they are carried out in each EU country.

VAT isn’t charged on exports of goods to countries outside the EU. In these cases, VAT is charged and due in the country of import and you don’t need to declare any VAT as an exporter. However, when exporting goods you will need to provide documentation as proof that the goods were transported outside the EU. Such proof could be provided by presenting a copy of an invoice, a transportation document or an import customs record to your tax authorities.

List of items charged VAT (non-exhaustive):

• Electronics (phones, computers, TVs)

• Clothing and footwear

• Furniture and household items

• Cars and motorbikes

• Fuel and energy (electricity, gas)

• Food and beverages (standard or reduced rate depending on country)

• Alcohol and tobacco

• Hotel stays and accommodation

• Restaurant meals

• Telecom and digital services

• Books, newspapers, and magazines (often at reduced or zero rate)

• Transport services (like air or rail tickets, depending on country)

  VAT Rates by country (also non-exhaustive):

• Austria: 20%​

• Belgium: 21%​

• Bulgaria: 20%​

• Croatia: 25%​

• Cyprus: 19%​

• Czech Republic: 21%​

• Denmark: 25%​

• Estonia: 22%​

• Finland: 25.5%​

• France: 20%​

• Germany: 19%​

• Greece: 24%​

• Hungary: 27%​

• Ireland: 23%​

• Italy: 22%​

• Latvia: 21%​

• Lithuania: 21%​

• Luxembourg: 17%​

• Malta: 18%​

• Netherlands: 21%​

• Poland: 23%​

• Portugal: 23%​

• Romania: 19%​

• Slovakia: 23%​

• Slovenia: 22%​

• Spain: 21%​

• Sweden: 25%

  Sources:

https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/quick-charts/value-added-tax-vat-rates

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-rules-rates/index_en.htm

https://www.globalvatcompliance.com/globalvatnews/world-countries-vat-rates-2020/

https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-rates/european-vat-rates.html`___`

My phase will happen before your phase, the way they are currently doing things.

It’s going to be great once every American is jobless and has all the free time to pursue hobbies involving CEOs, and the orange and rodent cancers in the Federal government. Think of all the possibilities!

That helps slightly but in the absence of radar, balloons, and satellite telemetry, it doesn’t help accuracy of forecast beyond, “it might rain here in a few hours, it might not.” Not much different in functional usefulness than looking at the trees to see if it’s going to rain.

I have a watch with a barometric pressure sensor, it will alert me to potential maybe coming storms, but only potential maybe, not what direction, what intensity, what hail potential, what wind shear. All it knows is the air pressure is changing pretty fast. It is right maybe one in ten times. (My location tends to have very rapid weather changes, in general, however.)

And outside of that, ground stations don’t really help to keep air traffic safely in the skies at all, lacking jet stream telemetry, which is calculated and estimated on a daily basis to figure out which sky highways flights should use. Not just passengers either, most commercial passenger airliners have a portion of their cargo hold sold to shipping (and make more money on that than the seats). USPS, other shipping companies all ship in cargo holds. Water transport would be affected as well of course, as well as rail and truck to a lesser degree due to floods/landslides/blizzards or random sideways Texas sandstorms blowing semi trucks over.

With flights, this means fuel estimates will be off, tailwind or headwind is stronger or weaker than predicted, you’re landing at an alternate airport. This means more random turbulence and/or injuries mid-flight. More grounded flights, more flight delays. More potential for collision. Especially with neutered ATC in concert.

It is all interconnected, and all being arbitrarily destroyed without any thought into why it all exists.

If we took the money we wasted larping around being “world police” our taxes would stay the same and we could all have universal healthcare and insurance/pharma companies could get bent. Of course, that whole fascism thing became the bigger fish to fry, for now.

The Omegle of Signal. Or the “I’m Feeling Lucky” of Signal.

FTA it seems:

• American Express
• WPP (ad agency)
• Omnicom (ad agency)
• Interpublic Group (ad agency)
• Publicis (ad agency)
• “increasing number of small brands”
• Stagwell (ad agency) possibly, as quoted in the article as saying, “The political boycotts and things are dissipating because companies are realizing that taking one side and the other is a dangerous place to be.”

A quick AI search for some of who uses/d those ad agencies:

WPP:

• HSBC
• Rolex
• Samsung
• Shell Oil
• Unilever
• Nestlé

Omnicom:

• Apple
• PepsiCo
• McDonalds
• Nissan
• Pfizer
• Unilever

Interpublic Group (IPG):

• American Express
• AstraZeneca
• GM
• Nestlé
• Amazon
• L’Oréal

Publicis:

• Google
• Dodge
• Humira
• Samsung
• Nestlé
• L’Oréal

Stagwell:

• Anheuser-Busch InBev
• JP Morgan
• Uber Eats
• AT&T
• Mastercard

How is California the bastion of Fascism? San Fran was to be the Starfleet headquarters. Turns out endoftheworld.swf got it wrong too. Cali should just be shat into the ocean to disappear, unlike the Flash video. What a waste of a good state that literally could wield power to stop DC. Is Man in the High Castle actually canon??

Well, Newsweek is out as news. They should have followed up with factual history about how these parties switched. (Where are the whigs in all this???)

America always being 2 party, in my own hindsight, should have been suspect. The world is not binary.

Not that I had control of when or where I was born.

Likely higher than that due to piss poor reporting. I recall seeing an alt government account hinting it could have already been in the 2000s a few weeks back but they couldn’t speak officially.

Pull the fuse to the telematics/SOS/cellular radio on your car. Don’t bring any health trackers or airtags. No Bluetooth anything. If you have a toll transponder, remove it from your car. Probably should disable the Bluetooth in the car as well, wifi as well if it has it. Anything that can broadcast a beacon can be tracked.

Asked an AI about this in general:

Prior to this law, only 66 out of 484 water systems in Utah practiced fluoridation, with Salt Lake City being the largest municipality affected.

Woah.

(Source AI chose: https://apnews.com/article/utah-fluoride-ban-43f67153beb3e06ada9d782655fb15de )